IT Services Newsletter #41

Welcome to the (belated publication of the) December edition, and also to our new members of the team in IT Support who were introduced in a separate staff announcement. A few of us were involved in last week’s degree congregations – in fact the Thursday ceremony included two processional marshals and the macebearer from IT Services! These are always fantastic events and although Imran Khan wasn’t available (he sent support messages), there were Honorary Degrees awarded to two more Khans: Dr. Mumtaz Khan (of Mumtaz restaurant fame) and Dr. James Khan (of Dragon’s Den). Excellent acceptance speeches from both of our new Doctors.


Recruitment News – project management framework
We have completed a tender for the project management of the Unified Communications Project. This project is going to have two phases – the first phase will be the migration of all our student email accounts from Outlook Live to Microsoft’s enhanced Office365 service. The second phase will be the migration of a number of staff services. There is no timetable yet for either of these activities, but we did secure Microsoft funding to complete the first stage by September 2013 latest (and much sooner is Microsoft’s preference!). We have appointed Jerry Niman to work on this project, and he will be joining us early in the New Year. Jerry has a significant amount of Higher Education and technical infrastructure experience as a previous Head of IT at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he was involved in several major email migration projects.

Reducing the number of reported IT incidents/service interruptions
At a recent IT Support Team meeting I mentioned some interesting management information from our servicedesk system (RMS). We are now into the second year of ITIL based coding which separates IT “incidents” from “requests for change” (we’re not yet recording “problems” separately). We can now compare the number of these things over the same period of time to see if service improvements and root cause analysis is actually making a difference. Of course, the devil is in the detail and the quality of the data recorded. However, in terms of overall direction in the months of October and November there was a 35% reduction (September) and 50% reduction (October) in the total number of incidents reported year-on-year. The number of requests for change was the same. Dave Ewen has been working on a proof of concept (using a product called Elkview) for “dashboard” reporting from RMS and demonstrated that last week. If you are interested in this sort of thing, then Dave can provide a really interesting overview.

In Other News

• There were a number of successful submissions to the most recent performance recognition process. Congratulations to all those who received an award – Sara has already sent a separate message. I am also very pleased to confirm two successful and well deserved re-grading submissions in our IT Infrastructure Team.
• John Fairhall has been doing some work with Jim Boyne over in the School of Life Sciences. There is a short video clip available here. This was launched at a recent Norcroft conference event and it was very well received. Both Jim and Jon Dermo in the Centre for Educational Development are keen to take it further. This might lead to more development work for the mobile app, but it looks very promising.
• The University student system (SAINT) was successfully upgraded over the weekend of December 8th and 9th in a “double upgrade”. A lot of planning went into this and a number of people were on call out and/or working over the weekend. These upgrades are relatively rare events happening twice a year, and they have a big impact on IT Services. Many thanks to all the team involved in making this happen.
• The Cloud Wi-Fi service is now using the JANET network. As well as enabling us to use more bandwidth, the service will benefit from the resilience of the University’s connection to JANET. Some of you will be aware that we had service interruptions on this over the Summer. The users will not notice any difference, the login process is still the same. With thanks to the Infrastructure Team for making this happen.
• We recently supported the Bradathon activity which aims to raise awareness and funding from alumni for student activity and investment. Bradenton commenced on Sunday 11th November 2012 and ran every weekday (6.00pm to 9.30 pm) and on Saturday 17th November 2012 to 2nd December 2012 (2.45pm to 8.00 pm). This was happening in F42 Sunray Cluster. Thanks to all those involved in supporting this activity in the run up to the 50th anniversary celebrations.
• There have been a number of Wi-Fi updates on campus. During November we reported that the remaining wireless base stations installed to bump up coverage levels in the extension part of JBPB floors 1 and 2 were operational. This brings to a conclusion a process which started in May to give good wireless coverage to all General Teaching Areas but has also included JBP Building floors 0-2 (with some extras on 01 and 02), and for academic departments parts of the ICT Building, Horton A floor 3 and some of Richmond M floor. In all there have been 30 new base stations installed, taking our total overall to 168 base stations.
• Work has been progressing on attendance monitoring solutions and a tender has now been issued for return before the end of December – although no-one will be looking at it until the New Year! The Project Board were especially grateful to the IT team for our contributions to the tender (a 60+ page document).

This is just a quick snapshot of some of the projects and activity which might be of interest. There is, as always, lots of other activity happening, so apologies if your work wasn’t included – please let me know for the next newsletter.